For the generations before us, the name Coppola brings to mind moustachioed mobsters in The Godfather and the capital-c ~Cinèma~ of Francis Ford Coppola. But for me, and many millennial women, it’s the soft cinema of his daughter, Sofia Coppola, that we think of — though her career very nearly took a different path. She…
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The phrase ‘backwards and in heels’ is derived from a cartoon by Bob Thaves drawn in 1982. Specifically, the cartoon stated that Ginger Rogers performed everything that Fred Astaire did in their films, except backwards and in heels. This phrase has come to emulate the recurrent struggles of women working in a patriarchal world, as…
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You weren’t allowed to be gay at my high school, but of course that never stopped anyone – my best friend included. We’d known each other for five years, been out of school for one, when she came out to me. It wasn’t anything major on my end, she was my friend and her sexuality…
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‘Water can be any shape, it just depends on the container,’ my brother eloquently said as we drove to the cinema. It was a good point – as he predicted, the new Guillermo del Toro film The Shape of Water fits into many movie genre moulds. It is a monster movie, an arthouse film, a…
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At midnight on a fateful summer evening, Star Wars fans lined up to get the first look at the new movie, with hopes high and adrenaline pumping through their veins. As an enthusiastic fan myself, I was amongst the rabble of strangely clad movie-goers in Melbourne, barely managing to keep myself awake to witness my…
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When a film begins with Magda Szubanski playing an eccentric radio host, you can’t help but feel you’re in for a good time. Writer and director Ben Elton (The Young Ones, Blackadder) has delivered just that with his new Australian comedy Three Summers. The film is set entirely at a fictional folk festival in Western…
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If someone asks me to watch a movie about sports I’ll usually pass; in all honesty with the exception of watching Space Jam or The Mighty Ducks I’d probably rather read ill-informed articles about whether the gender pay gap is real. But when I first saw the trailer for Battle of the Sexes I was…
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Zelos is a story of cheating. You have probably seen a lot of films like this, but what makes this one different is its realism. And unlike so many other films about cheating, this film is: written, directed, and co-produced by two young women (director Jo-Anne Brechin and writer Claire J Harris) and ALSO has…
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Sofia Coppola’s latest film, The Beguiled, opens with what seems like an innocent scene: a young girl out in the woods, humming to herself as she collects wild mushrooms. Yet there is something else going on beneath the surface: an undeniably sinister undertone present despite beautiful imagery. To beguile means to ‘persuade, attract, or interest…
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Jordan Peele’s Get Out extraordinarily combines the horror genre with poignant social commentary, using satirical observations to show the racial divide within Western society. For his directorial debut, Peele achieved his goal of showing a ‘common humanity’ by dispelling usual movie tropes. The film tells the story of Chris (Daniel Kaluuya), a young black man…
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Imagine this… a society that thinks it is strange to see a woman who is independent. They think it’s odd to find a woman who won’t be shushed, who is vocal, who doesn’t define herself in relation to a man—a woman who wants to fight back against oppression. This is the fantasy world of Wonder…
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At the Australian box office in 2014, just 8 per cent of the top 250 films had female directors. There were 21 Australian films among the top earners, and women directed only 14 per cent of them. These are just some of the many statistics in Screen Australia’s 2015 Gender Matters report that reveal the…
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Lip‘s Jessie Adams recently attended an exclusive season of The Love Witch at Melbourne’s Lido Cinemas. Check out her review below. Anna Biller’s second feature film The Love Witch weaves a kaleidoscopic spell in genuine 35mm colour film cinematography, conjuring complicated visions of feminine archetypes, gender politics, and sumptuous 1960s occult fashion and film aesthetics. The film…
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We found love in a hopeless place. It’s a familiar refrain for the millennial generation, and one that provides the soundtrack to key moments in Andrea Arnold’s latest film, American Honey. Rihanna’s We Found Love is the perfect music to capture the heart of this film, a winner of the Jury Prize at The Cannes Film…
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